My Story & This Blog

Who Am I

Hello, and welcome to The Arbing Blog! My name is Sam Priestley. I am 28 from England and I spend my time trying to start businesses and learn new skills. That’s me on the right on my honeymoon.

The Arbing Blog was launched in 2014 as online journal, somewhere I could record what I was up to. Somewhere that would be here forever and that I could always point to as a CV if I ever needed to get a job. I thought it might end up making money, but that was never the primary motivation.

The blog pottered along. I would write really long articles documenting exactly what I did when starting different businesses, and those posts started to get very popular.

Since then it has grown and now earns me quite a good income, but I try to keep it true to what it always was. An honest account of my experiences – not a preachy guru telling you what to do without ever doing it themselves.

I don’t consider myself an expert or a business genius. I am just an amateur muddling my way through. Perhaps you can learn from my experiences.

How It All Started

Almost 10 years ago while in my second year of university I was introduced to matched betting. A simple way to earn money from online bookies and casinos by taking advantage of the free bets they offer to new customers. It started off as just a way to get out of my overdraft and pay for the next night out, but over the year my earnings grew. By the Summer holiday I decided not to get a job, but dedicate myself full-time to matched betting. I managed to earn a mouth-watering £250 a week during the holiday.

The next year I grew from matched betting to arbitrage (known as arbing) and by the time I came to graduate I was earning more than any job could offer. Over the next few years, my earnings continued to grow and our strategies got more and more developed.

But always in the back of my mind was the thought that professional matched betting wasn’t what I should be doing. I wasn’t building any skills and it wasn’t a unfulfilling business – I wasn’t creating anything. So on the side I started reinvesting my profits into new businesses.

And a whole bunch more. From face-painting to a social network. Most of them failed. At the time I was young and naive and willing to try anything. I assumed everything was easy and had enough successes to reinforce that belief.

Seeing The Light

In 2012 I decided to get into the big leagues. I decided I wanted to be rich and the best way to do that would be to launch a technology startup. For the next year I put everything else on the back burner and worked solidly on it. We hired employees and pumped money into the business.

And it was horrendous. I became an entrepreneur in order to avoid having to get a job, and now I had done the opposite. Created myself a job where I had to arrive earlier and stay later than everyone else. I had all the stress of entrepreneurship and all the inconvenience of employership.

We eventually sold the business. I won’t ruin the story for you, read about it here. But the experience had a big impact on me. It made me realise that I didn’t want to be rich, rather I wanted my time to be own. To be able to choose what I do. So I changed my focus and decided to build only scalable outsourceable businesses. Ones that would generate me passive income.

Self-Improvement, Table Tennis & Retirement

The experience with my tech startup made me view matched betting and arbing with new eyes. I had returned to it because the money was good and I had commitments to my business partners, but I had no passion for it. I decided that I would retire and while I started the process I turned my attention to something more… interesting.

For a year I spent every day training table tennis in an attempt to become one of the best in the country. We called project Expert in a Year, I spectacularly failed. But despite that, the video of my year went viral (it now has over 7 million views) and my love of self-improvement and continuous learning was kindled.

To help give me more confidence and improve my soft-skills I became a volunteer policemen. Working weekends on what was called the rowdy bus. We were sent to any fights or gang trouble where they thought a bus full of bobbies would help. If I could deal with that then no confrontation in a boardroom would ever be an issue.

By the end of 2014, I had quit gambling and launched this blog. In my mind I had officially retired. I had enough saved that I could go a very long time without ever having to work. But I love starting businesses, so just kept doing it.

By the end of 2015, we were selling our products all across Europe and the Americas and were the best selling table tennis bat in the UK.

Hitting The Road & Becoming A Digital Nomad

All this time I had been living in central London, but in 2016 I got itchy feet. I gave up my flat, sold 90% of my stuff and armed with just a suitcase headed off to South America to live the life as a ‘digital nomad’. Someone who can live anywhere because they can earn an income through their computer and the internet.

For the next 18 months, I didn’t do much work. There was too much to experience as we travelled from country to country living in AirBnBs. In 2016 the only new business I started was a consultancy, A very simple business built off the back of this blog, which by 2017 was making a whopping £5,000 a month.

Instead, I focused on growing my table tennis businesses. Which by the end of 2016 had grown to be bigger and more profitable than matched betting ever was.